Archive for the ‘measurement’ tag

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

Social is extremely measurable, but first you have to do something that can be measured. Tracking URLs, visibility into your purchase funnel, unified customer databases. All of it can answer that “are we making money at this?” question, but too often people expect there to be a magic “social media measurement” button, even though there is no such button for radio, TV, email, direct mail, billboards, or fancy business cards.”

“Instead of spending time wondering which metrics are important to measure, start by getting marketing and social data into your core systems. Then we can debate which metrics are the best metrics, but I can tell you this. If you aren’t passing campaign data into your CRM, it’s unlikely you are measuring anything meaningful to your executive management team today. It’s time to fix it.”

“1) Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are dominating. These three social media power players collectively accounted for 15.22% of overall traffic last month. Given their community and share-friendly nature, it’s no surprise that they top the list in traffic referrals and have grown more than 54% each in share of overall visits. Facebook grew 58.81%, Pinterest by 66.52% and Twitter 54.12%. Pinterest’s growth is especially interesting now that the company is flirting with paid advertising.”

“According to new word-of-mouth (WOM) research from COLLOQUY, brand recommendations made via social media have grown 4% since the company’s last report in 2011, while the number of ‘real life’ conversations about brands has dropped 4%.”

“Did you know that nearly 1 in 4 people worldwide will use social media in 2013, and that by next year, two billion users globally will log on to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram?”

“3. Social media has grown as a source for news: 19% of Americans saw news on a social network “yesterday” in 2012, more than double the 9% who had done so in 2010. Those in their 30s (30%) are nearly as likely as those 18-24 (34%) to say they saw news or news headlines on Facebook or another social networking site yesterday. (Report)”

“‘People flock to Tumblr to be entertained and inspired, not to be pitched to,’ says Francis Skipper, executive vice president of 451 Marketing. ‘Therefore, it is key to be very visual and to use humor on Tumblr. Pieces should be easy for your audience to digest and promote sharing. And try to provide evergreen content that will have a longer shelf life, so your content can be shared often.’”

“Before the Internet became widely used, the media were the masters of the conversation. They filtered conversations and, by doing so, built our view of the world. But the expansion of the Internet blew up the pyramid of authority, making the world a place where everything can be shared, mimicked and copied. Memes never had such a fine environment to grow. Memecracy was born.”

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

Includes an excellent breakdown of all the G+ studies that have been done in the past few months, plus a series of infographics- interactive and static- showing usage by demographics across platforms. Fantastic breakdown overall!

“Twitter is used in eight out of the top 10 companies (Apple, Chevron, Exxon, Ford Motors, General Electric, General Motors, Phillips 66, and Wal-Mart). All these companies offer frequently status updates on Twitter. Just Berkshire Hathaway and Valero Energy are missing out. Interestingly enough, Facebook has got most followers on Twitter.”

“Twitter is ‘primarily a consumption channel,’ per the researchers, with the main activity among those using it at least in some part for business reasons being reading others’ tweets (86% of users). Still, 58% have retweeted something they’ve read, 55% have posted a tweet, 54% have responded to a tweet and 42% have sought support for a product.”

TweetReach: We’ve got one question we like to start everyone off with, to see all the different pathways people take into social media: How you got started with social media as a whole? Can you describe your first “ah-ha” moment?

Richard Janes: My background is in producing, directing and writing movies and TV. I had the opportunity to write for big studios such as Disney, saw my directorial debut distributed theatrically around the world and won an Emmy by the age of 25. My career was growing quickly– until the dreaded writer’s strike of 2007. Being a new kid on the block, fresh off the boat from England, my trajectory came to a quick stop.

We started holding Sunday brunches for our friends who had been laid off or directly affected by the strike. It was inevitable that our conversations would come back to the internet, the need for new distribution, power distribution amongst the “creatives” and, of course, the power of social media. My brain began to churn on the technology that was being born around us.

That year, looking to stay active, I produced a web series called Dorm Life. Initially, we exclusively distributed through Hulu. Since the show was based on a college dorm floor, it made complete sense to jump on social media. There, we had the freedom to creatively market and distribute the show. The feed and two-way conversation that developed between the show’s characters and fans was incredible– that’s when I had my “ah-ha” moment.

It become overly clear to me that social media just might be the answer to all the discussions our group of friends was having. During a backyard dinner party, Fanology Social was born. It took a few years to raise our seed money, but in 2010 we opened the doors to Fanology HQ providing social media services to celebrities and brands.

We are completely enjoying the ride: telling stories, creating conversations and engaging audiences. Our clients’ fans now total over 60 million on Facebook and 28 million on Twitter.

TweetReach: You’re active in the entertainment industry. How are others in your industry embracing social media and measurement? How is your approach different from everyone else?

Richard Janes: Our traditional entertainment industry accounts are responsible for 50% of our business, however, I would argue that all our clients are embracing the idea of being entertainment providers to communicate their message through social media. As far as the traditional entertainment industry goes we are still at an embryonic stage of social media use. There appear to be three main buckets that our competitors fall into:

1. The agency that is focused on looking after celebrities and either driving all their social media traffic to a celebrities website where they monazite via low CPM adverts, or

2. The social media factory with hundreds of celebrity clients where they have a set formula that doesn’t deviate with each client, but at least it gets the celebrity building their audience.

3. Traditional ad agencies that approach social media as they do traditional advertising with the focus on the sell rather than the building of meaningful relationships.

What makes us different is that we are 100% focused on social media; we develop client-specific strategy and content (copy, graphics, videos and experiences) for each platform. First and foremost we are entertainment providers who have spent decades building content that evokes an emotional response providing continual value to the end user.

TweetReach: You engage clients like Shay Mitchell from Pretty Little Liars—both she and her show have a huge fan base that’s active on Twitter. How do you measure fan engagement around her and her character? What measurement benchmarks are important to you, and how do you use TweetReach to get them?

Richard Janes: Shay Mitchell is a great example of an actress who really ‘gets’ social media. She understands that she is where she is- and will achieve her lofty goals- ONLY as a result of her fans continued support.

Shay is really a dream client for us.

As part of our strategy, we support her in weekly Twitter parties around the show, which drives huge interaction from her fan base. For the season finale, our hashtag #PLLayWithShay received over 96,000 tweets, 177,000,000 impressions and trended worldwide for nearly two hours.

The average Twitter party runs an hour and after we are able to track the success through TweetReach Analytics. We love the immediacy of TweetReach!

As far as the benchmarks we use to measure success, it really varies from client to client and partner to partner. With our celebrity clients they have so many brand partners (from the TV shows and studios through to magazines, talk shows, and product lines they endorse) we have to have access to a wide variety of trustworthy data so that we can meet any of their insight requests at a give time.

From a brand perspective like Live Nation, it’s all about the click through to buy tickets. But with Toyota, there isn’t the expectation that a click on a link is going to directly result in the purchase of a new Pruis C. Not yet anyway!

TweetReach: How do you look at and think about the mix of different social media networks when designing your social strategy—are you looking at incorporating more than just Twitter? What kind of different approaches might you take with different platforms, and what lessons do you think you can take with you from Twitter?

Richard Janes: We work across social media from Google+ Hangout’s with Jillian Michaels and Ashley Tisdale to Twitter parties with Shay Mitchell and Jesse McCartney, all the way through to a Redit AMA with Morgan Spurlock.

The key for us is developing a strong narrative on each platform that caters to each platform’s strengths and takes the fan on a journey, rather than through random updates where social media fatigue can set it. As far as immediate interaction, Twitter is the king and multiple updates work great in creating a two-way conversation, be it with a celebrity’s Twitter party, or working as a customer service tool for some of the IOS gaming companies we work with. When it comes to Facebook we have to be a lot more focused on our client’s updates; with Google+ SEO is making a big difference.

TweetReach: Have you looked at social media success or failure in other industries for pointers on how to apply best practices in your work? Any good examples?

Richard Janes: 100%, we are all pioneers and there is no point in having tunnel vision with the way we do business. We are constantly on the lookout for innovative work and you never know where that may come from: a massive agency with a huge budget, or a local musician who has come up with a great way to get all his friends turning up to a gig.

TweetReach: Haha fantastic, Richard! Thanks for talking to us. And we’ll keep watching to see where Fanology Social takes its clients next!

British CEO and lifelong entrepreneur, Richard Janes, started Fanology Social after recognizing the power of social media. His award winning career as a writer/director has informed the companies underlying goal of employing storytelling as the main strategy of boosting clients engagement.

A childhood actor, Janes ended up finding his place behind the camera. At the tender age of 23, he directed his first feature length film that was distributed internationally. Shortly after, Janes’ pilot went on to win an Emmy. He had the pleasure of writing feature screenplays for major studios such as Disney.

Since falling in love with social media, Janes and his team of Fanologists, have been recognized with various awards (DigiDay award, Webby nominated) and work with the top names in the social media circuit (Shay Mitchell, Ashley Tisdale, Toyota).

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments!

“What will it take to build emotive-and-empathic data experiences? Less data science and more data art — which, in other words, means that data wranglers have to develop correlations between data much like the human brain finds context. It is actually not about building the fanciest machine, but instead about the ability to ask the human questions. It is not about just being data informed, but being data aware and data intelligent.”

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments!

“In the end, social media can really stand on its own and provide insights and a lot of great learning and opportunity, but if you go well beyond just pure brand listening, the potentials are far greater.”

“An influencer is someone will write up a branded post, send out a few tweets and do their tasked outlined in their contract. An advocate, will not only do all those things, but will continuously use the product or brand in their daily lives, insert themselves into relevant conversations concerning the topic, and will fight for the products they love. Both of these types of blogger have their part in the blogosphere, but it is the latter that will make the biggest impact for brands.”

“The approach was not that there was just a social media department, but every piece of that business, right from the top to the creative teams to the live events staff to the writers to the superstars themselves, now have a stake in telling that story for the fans that really expect it on a 24/7 basis.”

Two years ago we did a recap of SXSWi 2011 in tweets after the five days of the Interactive portion of the festival were over. (In case you’re still unfamiliar, SXSW is a great big gathering of all kinds of interactive professionals – from social media folks to software developers and startup founders, to designers, researchers and basically anyone interested in the digital space. SXSW Interactive is a tech conference, and is followed by the film and music portions of the festival.)

Here’s a table comparing the tweet volume, total number of unique contributors, and overall reach for 2011 vs. 2013:

What a difference two years can make!

Here’s a breakdown of the 2013 SXSW tweet activity:

Activity breakdown for tweets and contributors during SXSWi 2013

Were you at SXSWi? How was your experience? Tell us in the comments, old hats and newbies alike.

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments!

“Josh Brown, a financial adviser at New York-based Fusion Analytics who is known as The Reformed Broker to his 35,000-plus Twitter followers, says many of his friends at major brokerage firms regularly visit sites like Twitter, just to keep tabs on the chatter.”

“The mental hurdle that bank officers needed to overcome when starting out in social media was the fear of ‘losing control’ of their marketing message. For many of the Marketing Committee members, platforms like Facebook were widely misunderstood. A majority of time at the beginning of this project was spent educating the bank about how social media marketing works (different from traditional media) and how it can effectively be applied to create a deeper loyalty within their customers.”

“At times the Twitter conversation is more liberal than survey responses, while at other times it is more conservative. Often it is the overall negativity that stands out. Much of the difference may have to do with both the narrow sliver of the public represented on Twitter as well as who among that slice chose to take part in any one conversation.”

See the full article for charts on when Twitter’s reaction was more conservative, when it nearly matched public sentiment, and more.

“. . .there is a common thought in the digital universe that goes like this: create relevant content and consumers will continue to connect with your brand. It’s not a zero-sum game and it’s not an all-encompassing strategy. It may be in marketers vested interest to adjust that theory to this: create relevant content and your heavy users may continue to connect with your brand.”

“According to a study by RightNow, when customers did receive a response to their complaint, almost half of them were pleased by the company’s interaction, and 22% of those customers posted a positive comment about the company or brand. Keep in mind that this is the same company they were bashing just recently.”

Welcome back to TakeFive with TweetReach, our ongoing interview series with influential members of the Twitter measurement universe. This week, we’re excited to speak with Brian Conway, Account Supervisor for Weber Shandwick, about his experiences with social media and how his initial personal use of the medium lead to a deeper understanding for the impact and potential use it had for brands. He takes this insight with him into projects with current clients, such as American Airlines.

TweetReach: Let’s start with talking about how you got started using social media. Can you describe your first “ah-ha” moment?

Brian Conway: My initial experience with social media was in the mid-2000s for personal use when platforms like Facebook and Twitter had really only made a name for themselves as being unique to the individual experience. It wasn’t until 2008 or 2009 that I started paying much closer attention to how those same individual messages aggregate over time to form a larger brand picture that can be pretty — or pretty ugly. The fact that individuals suddenly had so much influence over a company’s brand reputation and strategic direction was a huge eye-opener for me— that was my “ah-ha” moment. This understanding has since influenced how I’ve approached some of the community management and crisis roles I’ve held for a variety of clients.

TweetReach:How have you seen your clients approach Twitter as part of their digital strategy?

Brain Conway: Broadly speaking about Weber Shandwick, the number of clientele using Twitter and other social media platforms has exploded tremendously in the last three or four years. Nearly all use Twitter for some kind of public engagement, and that ranges from corporate news to marketing announcements to social customer service. Others still use it for listening only. Message reach and response is always important, but what we encourage companies to look for are individual conversations, sentiment, and reach of positive messages. Brand-building or brand regress happens over time, so any corporate Twitter strategy needs to take ongoing listening into big consideration. From my personal experience, I’ve been very closely tied to American Airlines’ social media program since 2009, and Twitter has become a hugely invaluable engagement resource, as well as a strong component of its award-winning social customer service program.

TweetReach: How important is measurement of engagement on Twitter to your strategy with clients? Do you have specific goals and campaign metrics that you use to measure performance and success?

Brian Conway: Measurement of social engagement, be it Twitter or any other platform, is as crucial as your digital strategy. After all, a company doesn’t devote budget and time to a platform simply for the sake of grins, right? I often advocate for a well-balanced approach to quantitative and qualitative measurement for clients, and it all starts with goals. If your campaign goals focus squarely on follower growth or message reach as a measure of success, it’s very easy to track those KPIs quantitatively. But, we believe our clients need to know not just how many conversations there were, but what was actually said and what it means for the company’s business objectives.

TweetReach: Along those lines, let’s talk about the measurement of reach. How do you weigh the importance of the quantity of a campaign’s reach (the overall size of the potential audience) vs. the quality of that reach?

Brian Conway: As I mentioned, it’s very important to have a well-balanced mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis for any social media campaign, proactive or reactive. Again, it all comes back to goals and what kind of success you want to achieve for your organization. Some social campaigns may lend themselves more toward KPIs like audience reach, impressions, sales growth, volume of submissions, awareness-generation, volume of tweets using your hashtag, and the like. Other campaigns may focus more on engagement. Some important qualitative questions to ask: What message points resonated best with our followers? Did our posts trigger any unexpected conversations? How does this Twitter campaign help us prepare for the next one?

TweetReach: Do you have any examples of how analytics have helped you adjust or improve your social media activities? Has this ever happened in the middle of a campaign?

Brian Conway: In one instance for a former client, we had pre-determined the entire course of proactive messaging for the client’s social media campaign. Almost halfway into the campaign, our tracking and reporting revealed significant conversations around a storyline we hadn’t even considered, and it gave us cause to revise our messaging strategy to make sure we spoke more about this other storyline people obviously wanted to discuss. When we reported our findings to the client, we were met with some understandable skepticism about changing our strategy, but in the end, we showed that adaptability and commitment to listening can contribute to campaign success— which is exactly what we saw.

Brian assists with the coordination and management of digital/social media programs at varying levels of strategic corporate engagement, including brand reputation management, outreach strategy, new business development, and crisis monitoring and program implementation. Currently, Brian supports a number of Weber Shandwick clients’ social media programs, including American Airlines and Essilor of America. Among Brian’s primary expertise are community management and message engagement, proactive social campaign strategy, social media crisis comnunications, and blogger relations strategy.

One of our very own will be presenting at SXSW Interactive this year. Jenn Deering Davis, Union Metrics Co-Founder and Chief Community Officer, will be speaking about how Twitter has changed how we watch TV on Saturday, March 9 during the festival. We wanted to get a preview of her presentation, so we thought we’d ask her a few questions about social TV and share her responses with you.

How do you think social media has changed how viewers communicate about television shows?

Social media provides a great place for us to talk about our favorite TV shows and characters. It allows fans distributed across the country – even the globe – to share the experience of watching a show together. TV is such an important part of our culture, particularly in the United States; many of us watch some TV every single day, and we’re deeply connected to the shows we watch and the people in them. We want to talk about TV, and social media channels like Twitter are the perfect place for those conversations.

What are some of the creative strategies that networks and advertisers are employing to tap into social TV?

There’s certainly a lot of hashtag use right now. You can’t watch a TV show – or a commercial – without seeing hashtags all over the place. Some of the more interesting fan engagement initiatives include creating character Twitter accounts that tweet during and between episodes, sharing content exhaust like behind-the scenes photos and outtakes, and running social games and contests to unlock premium content.

What shows are doing social TV really well?

So many shows and show runners are doing interesting things on social media. Pretty Little Liars is one of the canonical examples – PLL and the team at ABC Family have created a huge and highly engaged following on Twitter and Facebook. As for others, I love how characters from Archer tweet as themselves (and to each other!), how Hollywood award shows like the Golden Globes post pictures from the red carpet and backstage, and how Netflix capitalized on the huge social interest around its new show House of Cards. There are so many great examples. For more, you’ll just have to come to the panel.

How important is a standard measurement system for social TV and do you think Twitter’s work with Nielsen will push it forward?

Networks have been using Twitter as a way to understand the real-time pulse of their shows for several years, and I think it’s smart of Nielsen and Twitter to work together to formalize some of that. We can learn a lot about what fans think about a show by measuring their tweets. For example, tracking minute-by-minute volume helps us understand viewer interest spikes, telling us exactly what onscreen moments are exciting to the audience. I think this area will mature a great deal over the next few years.

Twitter is at the center of the social TV discussion, but what other platforms do you think are poised to become a larger part of this movement?

Twitter was the first social channel to be really successful in the TV space for a variety of reasons (which I’ll discuss in more detail at SXSW), but we’re starting to see a lot more fan participation in other channels, as well. Tumblr is a big one, because millions of fans go to Tumblr to share and remix all kinds of amazing visual content about their favorite shows, and that content spreads like crazy on Tumblr. Social TV conversations happen in all the social media spaces we spend time in, but we’ve just heard the most about Twitter so far. I think that’s changing.

How does online streaming content tap into social TV? Will advertisers cater to this demographic, or keep pushing for live viewing?

Great question. We’re starting to understand more about how social impacts (and is impacted by) both live and streamed viewing. I’ll get into this more during the talk, but we’re actually seeing a comeback in live TV right now! It’s fascinating stuff, but I’ll leave that as a teaser for now.

If you want to hear more, then be sure to check out Jenn’s talk at SXSW in Austin next week. And be sure to go say hi afterwards – she’d love to talk to you. She might even have party invites to share if you ask nicely.

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments!

“Tumblr outstrips Pinterest despite not having significantly more unique visitors. For 2012 as a whole, Tumblr sported an audience of 30.8 million visitors (up 64% year-over-year), but was closely followed by Pinterest (28.9 million, up 284% year-over-year), and Instagram (27.4 million, also up 284%). In December 2012, it ranked 10th among the largest social networking sites and forums, as measured by market share of visits.”

“This really hasn’t been a huge issue,” Karp added. “This industry is so bored of display, bored of blue links, so excited to create ads that win awards, that really tell stories, that make customers, that people remember, that get people excited, that you can put in your portfolio. There aren’t a lot of AdWords ads or display ads that you can put in a portfolio.”

About TweetReach

TweetReach is brought to you by Union Metrics. We focus on delivering powerful social analytics that enable marketers to measure and improve their social media campaigns. We provide analytics across Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Here on our TweetReach blog, we share our favorite Twitter tactics and strategies, as well as company announcements and events.